


I, Di-Stri

by epochryphal



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Dysphoria, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Genderqueer Character, Neutrois Character, Non-binary character, Otherkin, Robotkin, Robots, Species Dysphoria, Trans Character, Transitioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:10:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1966758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epochryphal/pseuds/epochryphal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fuck flesh bodies.  You're a prodigy; you can make your own, appropriate chassis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I, Di-Stri

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you’re about to go all I, Robot up in this bitch.

Okay, imperfect comparison. But seriously, the entirety of human media at your post-apocalyptic-time-period disposal, and not a single story adequately captures what you’re seconds away from achieving.

You’re transitioning from human to robot.

It’s a trans thing all right. Transhuman, transgender, trans+, eat your heart out neologists. No more eating for you; you’re cutting your own heart out of the equation.

This has been lurking behind your eyes since before you soldered your first wire, drew your first specs, researched your first how-to electronics. It’s greeted you in the mirror through the thickest and darkest tinted shades you could craft—a flickering orange light saying, “Standby.” It’s been there with every zit, every migraine, every goddamn hemorrhoid; every misstep, every slip of the hand, every brain fart. It was there when you started showing symptoms of puberty and wound up sobbing yourself to sleep, in the little sparks you fancied your tears made down your face. When you added a prescription to your lenses and officially declared yourself a cyborg; when you frantically researched synthetic hormone blockers and side effects and the inescapable temporal constraints; when you dreamed.

It’s taken countless projects, stepping stones to greater purpose: from shitty watches to panda-face toasters up to roombas and semi-intelligent music shufflers, from rap generators and depression-time-chorebots to voice modulators and a waltz partner. Some benefits you’d been able to reap along the way: the voice programming let you fine-tune the pitch of your voice, send it into the androgyny range or dual-layer multiple pitches or (your favorite) turn it metallic and genderless yet fully inflectional. You’d tested that one over voicechat with your friends, gotten them used to the sound of it (the sound of you), practiced fielding questions about your abandoning humanity. (Hell, you’d even built a program to answer and/or deflect those questions for you.)

But here it is. Here is your body, your true form, wholly and completely yours in every way.

You run a loving hand over your chassis, admiring your handiwork from the outside for the last time. The smoothness of the chestplate; the richness of the color-changer, the way it can shift any part of your body across the color gradient, to imitate metal or skin tones or environment or high fashion. The tools hidden in your fingers, always on hand (ha. ha.); the full body sensors for pressure, temperature, wind, malfunction, all the purposes of touch with none of the unpleasantness (and seriously, the ability to turn off proximity sensors when forced to crowd? priceless). The perfect metal teeth and tongue and mobile lips and jaw, not needed to produce speech but useful for lipreading in noisy environments. You’d settled for humanoid with a hint of uncanny valley, tinkered until you hit just alien enough. Your present fleshy fingers hover just above the smooth expanse between your new legs, and you sigh in contentment and yearning.

So close now.

You’ve stripped naked, all your fleshy lewdness laid bare one final time as you shuffle off this mortal coil. You refrain from grimacing as you affix the electrodes to your sticky skin and double-check them in the lab mirror; in fact, you end up cracking a smile at how incredibly un-Frankenstein you look. It hardly seems real.

You turn slowly and walk past the medbot on standby in case of emergency, past the machinery ready and running, and climb onto the cold metal table under your own meaty power. You shiver; lay down, parallel to your new body; begin a slow run-through of your muscles, like when you’re trying to fall asleep, except this time you’re saying goodbye. Bye, useless baby toe muscle. Goodbye, weak calf muscle. Sayonara, douchebag internal organs of crampageddon. Auf weinerschnitzel, acid reflux. Adieu, tangled up brain.

 _To god,_ you think silently.

Then, with eyes wide open, you give the command.

"Engage."


End file.
